Obama's Cyber Plan Raises Privacy Hackles

"The same folks are being potentially entrusted with cybersecurity who have already shown that they have no regard for the law," says Lee Tien, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that sued AT&T for its involvement in those wiretapping programs. "It's troubling that the Obama administration would consider this sort of thing."

Related Updates

Gov. Jerry Brown has signed A.B. 90, a bill that EFF advocated for to bring additional accountability and transparency to the various shared gang databases maintained by the State of California. With a campaign organized by a broad coalition of civil liberties organizations—such as Youth Justice Coalition, National Immigration...

EFF and 57 organizations, including American Civil Liberties Union, R Street, and NAACP, spoke out against warrantless searches of American citizens in a joint letter this week demanding reforms of the so-called “backdoor search” loophole that exists for data collected under Section 702. The backdoor search loophole allows federal...

Since first appearing on the streets of New York City in 2016, LinkNYC’s free public Wi-Fi kiosks have prompted controversy. The initial version of the kiosks’ privacy policy was particularly invasive: it allowed for LinkNYC to store personal browser history, time spent on a particular website, and lacked clarity...

Turning off your Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios when you’re not using them is good security practice (not to mention good for your battery usage). When you consider Bluetooth’s known vulnerabilities, it’s especially important to make sure your Bluetooth and Wi-Fi settings are doing what...

UPDATE: EFF also opposes H.R. 3548. Like S. 1757, it would expand border surveillance with biometric, drone, and ALPR technologies. The bill, styled the Border Security for America Act, was introduced by Rep. McCaul in July. EFF opposes a new federal bill that would dramatically expand dragnet biometric...

UPDATE: See our more detailed analysis of this DHS notice. For some time, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been collecting and scrutinizing the social media of certain immigrants and foreign visitors. This chills and deters the free speech and association not just of these immigrants and...

This summer 143 million Americans had their most sensitive information breached, including their name, addresses, social security numbers (SSNs), and date of birth. The breach occurred at Equifax, one of the three major credit reporting agencies that conducts the credit checks relied on by many industries, including landlords, car lenders...

EFF sent California Gov. Jerry Brown a letter urging him to sign S.B. 31. This bill, authored by Sen. Ricardo Lara, would prevent state and local government in California from assisting the federal government in creating a registry based on religious belief, national origin, or ethnicity. All too...

In April 2017, Terry Spears shared his story with San Diego’s local public media station KPBS on what it’s like to be listed in the CalGang database. Even though Mr. Spears says he has never been in a gang, it hasn’t stopped law enforcement from harassing him, and he once...